HOSPITALITY IN THE SHELTER AND THE SHADOW: CHURCH AS A PLACE OF RADICAL HOSPITALITY AND COMMUNITY DIALOGUE
The Noon Service is a new worshiping community of Christ Church Cathedral in Cincinnati, Ohio. In a series of 3 articles, leaders of the community draw on their experience cultivating the Noon Service community over the past 2+ years to offer reflections on fresh expressions emerging in the Episcopal Church during these strange times.
God is the crack where the story begins
We are the crack where the story gets interesting.
We are the choice of where to begin –
the person going out? The stranger coming in?
– Padraig O’Tuama
It’s Saturday night and s group of us are gathered on the back deck of a house in Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood—a potluck meal spread over the kitchen countertops and people gathered in chairs and squished together around a table for six that is currently holding about 10. Others are eating on the steps, and in the grass. A toddler wanders around offering sticks to anyone who will take one, clearly at ease in this community. This is a Moveable Feast, a monthly potluck dinner hosted by various members of the Noon Service in homes, an open space for conversation and relationships to emerge and grow. Some of the folks here have known each other for years, some just came for the first time tonight. Although the hosts have opened their home, the whole community exudes a distinct hospitality, paying attention to the cracks. Noticing if someone is left out, someone will make space or ask a question that keeps the conversation flowing.
Radical hospitality is at the heart of the Noon Service ethos. It emerges from a deep understanding of what it is to feel unwelcome as you are, and the related pressure to conform to community expectations in the Christian traditions from which many of us have come. There is genuine warmth and a spaciousness here that allows people to enter at their own pace.
In this final piece, I will share reflections from Noon Service members Mary, Patrick, Kyle, and Drew. Each offers a different perspective on what this new faith community means to them. Mary, a therapist and part of the initial team of Cathedral members, feels called to reach out to disaffected communities beyond the Cathedral’s walls and help people feel comfortable and welcome. She and Patrick have informally served as the welcoming hosts on Sunday morning, helping to set up the chapel space, hand out bulletins, and invite people to read or bring forward the gifts each week. Patrick, a gay man who owns several bars in Cincinnati and who with his husband recently adopted a baby boy, reflects that he has never been in a congregation with so much community. He is a bit surprised by the depth of friendship and supportive networking that is infused into this community. People show up for each other—they help each other move, or come out to support someone performing music at a local festival, or simply play kickball together at a local park.
As Mary and Patrick reflect on the kind of hospitality that is required, it models the nuance they both embody. They pay attention, they notice when someone lingers and leans in, looking for more. They also respect people who just want to pass through. Not everyone wants to make a nametag and come to lunch. It’s ok just to be here. You can go at your own pace and be honest about what you need.
Kyle, another Noon Service member, grew up in a Church of Christ congregation his grandparents help start. In the midst of a health crisis, existential questions emerged for him that theologically conservative answers no longer fit. Kyle, his wife, and three kids dove out of church all at once, leaving behind four generations of family and friends intricately woven into their lives. Kyle describes himself as a Christian agnostic: “I love Jesus and the teachings of Jesus and I love the freedom to be here with our doubts, fears, and desires and not have any judgement about that. I can be as involved or not as involved as I want to be. I appreciate that the community is not overbearing. I can come and share my doubts and people say, ‘Tell me about that.’” For Kyle, it is the meaningful conversations and porous boundaries that makes the Noon Service work. People are understood to be individuals who are growing and changing.
At the heart of the Noon Service is dialogue. Each Sunday, people gather in a circle and reflect on the lectionary readings together and the ways that God is showing up in our midst. A reflector from the leadership team—most weeks a lay person, though sometimes Cathedral clergy—shares a few thoughts about how these readings are connected to their life or the questions they are asking. Some weeks it is deeply poignant as someone shares a wound from their earlier life. Some weeks it is a bit messy and meandering as someone risks sharing a reflection for the first time. The beauty of it is that after a few minutes, the reflector turns to the circle of people—whether 12 (as it was in the beginning) or sometimes 70 (as it is now)—and says, “What do you think?” In fits and starts, people begin to share. Sometimes there is prolonged silence. Silence is welcome here. Eventually, someone will speak up and add their own questions and stories, creating a multi-layered collage of wisdom. There is room for dissent and disagreement, there is affirmation and vulnerability. The leadership team know how to challenge when things get too heady or too neat and tidy. They offer up humor or a personal story that reminds us that none of us have it all figured out. Sometimes someone just says thank you.
It has taken time to develop this practice, and it has certainly shifted. In the beginning, we would turn to our neighbors and talk, but as more people have joined (some with impaired hearing) we have adjusted to practice welcome even in the logistics of our dialogue. We navigated how to use microphones while considering the power dynamic they introduced, framing them “as talking sticks” rather than amplifiers. We found the budget to hire sign language interpreters each Sunday. We have learned to share not just verbally but non-verbally. There is a lot of eye contact, smiles, head nods, and tears. People follow up and the conversations seem to meander on after worship has ended.
Drew, an exvangelical, gay man, has used his Southern charm to invite people in the Noon Service community to break bread together as one way to continue the conversation. Drew and his husband Robert make it their personal ministry to invite people to lunch or dinner at their house. Sometimes Drew knows to nudge the Dean of the Cathedral or another member that this is someone you might want to know. There is an amazing correlation between these basic acts of connection and those who choose to formally join the Cathedral. These invitations and introductions create a kind of web of relationships that have proven to help people feel part of something. They take the best relational practices of evangelical communities and weave them together with the curiosity and respect for difference of Anglicanism.
Like every other community of faith, we are attempting to translate these practices online in the face of COVID-19. We are still asking questions about how technology can connect us and how does it change us. How can we practice radical hospitality without being able to share food together after church or in our homes? How can we welcome new people in a time of social distancing? How do we continue to co-create space that isn’t just designed by church professionals in times when all of us are overwhelmed by a global pandemic? There are no easy answers and the leadership team is working to innovate in real time. We have begun gathering online on Wednesdays for a “community check in,” a time for personal sharing about how we are doing and are exploring the use of breakout rooms to continue to hold space for intimacy and vulnerability on Sundays. As we think through these things, the core question remains: “What does it feel like to a stranger arriving for the first time?”
In Padraig O’Tuama’s stunning book In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World, he writes, “It is in the shelter of each other that the people live. It is also in the shadow of each other that the people live …. I wonder if the wisdom of this proverb demands a kind of discernment, a peering into the blur of ordinary living to decide when closeness overshadows and when it protects.” Drew reminds me that this is why the Noon Service resonates with so many people. People come to church because they need connection. The church, in turn, is called to meet that real need for human connection: Sharing a meal in someone’s home, asking questions and really listening for the heartfelt response, being unafraid of discomfort, silence, or pain. Radical hospitality means whoever you are there is space. It is about presence and listening, noticing and invitation. It asks us to keep opening ourselves a little wider and at the same time drawing closer. Shadow and shelter, we need each other.
